NEW YORK - In the 30 years that David France, director of the Oscar-nominated AIDS activism documentary "How to Survive a Plague," has lived at the corner of 7th Street and Avenue C, the neighborhood has transformed dramatically. During the worst years of the epidemic in the 1980s, death pervaded this far corner of the East Village. "It was inescapable. You would see people who were skinny, skinny skeletons trying to catch their breath, wheelchairs with men in their 20s, the KS [Kaposi's sarcoma]

Geographically, California is more than 94% rural. Despite that statistic from the 2010 census, many residents consider rural California the stretch of the 5 Freeway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. That discovery was a bit disconcerting for agriculture writer and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton. So two years ago she logged close to 10,000 miles traveling from her home in Marin County to the far-flung destinations of Modoc County, Raisin City and Lost Hills. With her infant daughter in tow she gathered stories and photographed locales and landscapes she identified as "places where the culture and the economy are defined by the direct use of natural resources.

Public television star Huell Howser, who died this month of prostate cancer, did not talk openly about his illness because "he never wanted the story to be about him," his assistant said. The host of the TV series "California's Gold," which focused on unique and commonplace locales around the state, died Jan. 7 at his home in Palm Springs. "He was dedicated to doing his job even when he was sick," said Ryan Morris, his assistant of seven years. Howser had ambitious plans last year for the show that he ended up having to cancel, Morris said.

Wonder what a walrus sounds like underwater? Or what sounds a West European hedgehog makes? Or an ostrich chick while still inside its shell? The world's largest and oldest archive of nature's sounds is now accessible online, a digital treasure chest of bird songs and mammal calls familiar and exotic. It took the Cornell Lab of Ornithology a dozen years to fully digitize its Macaulay Library audio archives, which date back to 1929. The archive, which also includes videos, contains recordings of 9,000 species.

Aaron Swartz, who co-founded Reddit and became an Internet folk hero for fighting to make online content free to the public, committed suicide Friday. He was 26. Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, said a statement released by his family and his girlfriend. "Aaron's commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life," the statement said. "He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place.

"Singin' in the Rain" got it wrong. The beloved 1952 musical-comedy spoofing the transition from silent films to sound in Hollywood didn't reflect what really happened after the release of 1927's "The Jazz Singer," the blockbuster starring Al Jolson that featured synchronized songs and limited dialogue. According to UCLA Film & Television Archive programmer Paul Malcolm, the studios didn't go into a panic, as portrayed in the Gene Kelly-Debbie Reynolds classic, when "all of a sudden production stopped and nobody knew what to do. " What actually happened, said Malcolm, was "a very rational, ordered decision to move forward with sound production, and they did it in a very rational and orderly way. " PHOTOS: Behind-the-scenes Classic Hollywood The studios decided to make multiple versions of motion pictures.

In Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's full obituary of the pioneering and influential critic Ada Louise Huxtable, he expands upon the news Monday that the Getty Research Institute has acquired her archives. Along with her papers, the Getty will receive those of her husband, industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, who died in 1989. In addition to the written materials, Huxtable also donated her entire estate to the Getty, including her New York City apartment and a house in Marblehead, Mass.

Want to go to back and read your old tweets? Soon you might be able to. Twitter announced Wednesday that it has begun to roll out an archive tool that lets users see all the tweets they ever sent, including retweets. The San Francisco-based social network said the feature will first get to users who have their Twitter account default language set to English. Then over the coming weeks and months, Twitter will get the feature to the rest of its users. QUIZ: What set the Internet on fire in 2012?

Twitter is testing a tool that lets users go back and look at all the tweets they have ever sent. Users around the Twittersphere began to spot the Twitter archive feature on Saturday - the company confirmed the test to The Times on Sunday. "We are currently testing the ability to download your Tweets with a very small percentage of users," Twitter said in an email. One user tweeted that if you have the feature, it's at the bottom of your settings page where it says "Your Twitter Archive.